Parents are being advised on how to cope with "boomerang children" – offspring who come back even after you've thrown them out. (Indeed, the further you throw them, the faster they come back.) A manual published this week by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform advocates tough love, suggesting that beneficiaries of a full fridge and a clothing valet service will never leave home.

I don't understand this. It is a badge of honour for young people to have nothing in the fridge but vodka and batteries. That's why they leave home in the first place, to get away from the incessant juice and cheese. People will travel continents to escape a mother who irons. You leave home because your parents vex and suffocate you with the assumption that you're six years old and don't know how to turn off a tap or answer the phone without swearing.

All this is as old as time itself, surely. And yet more young people than at any time in two decades – 25% of men and 13% of women aged between 25 and 29 – are still at home. That is a massive social shift. Parents must have become exponentially nicer to live with. I blame the oestrogen in tap water. Or perhaps there's been a massive recession and graduate unemployment has gone up 44% in one year.

Anyway, a few weeks loafing about looking in the fridge can so easily turn into a few months lying on the sofa; and before you know it, your young graduates are long-term unemployed, polishing off your Benecol. You need to get them moving again, but the manual stresses: "Don't nag – nagging can make young people feel more stressed and makes failure to get a job worse." This doesn't read at all like an instruction to the parent of an adult. How can an agency of regulatory reform know anything about my nagging technique, or yours? I might have 560 styles of harassment, each tailored for the appropriate family member and size of task.

This always happens when you read tips from a government department striving to get into the crevices of personal space. It never convinces, because it can never be controversial. It has to take the most neutral line, because anything else would prompt scrutiny, and the first thing a scrutineer would say is: "What on earth are you doing on this territory, government department?"

We all have unique relationships with our parents and children. So the very idea of universal behaviours and techniques that will work in every household is flawed. More than flawed, though, I believe that it actively, if only subtly, damages social cohesion. Every time you listen to a piece of advice – from "Don't iron" to "Use a low-fat spread" – and think, well, that's not me, I am morally opposed to low-fat spreads and I don't know how to iron, the effect is a miniature alienation: not just between oneself and the voice of authority, but also between oneself and one's peers. We all assume, if it's not us, then it must be most people, otherwise there would be no point saying it.

All this – the meddling, the embarrassment (no department enjoys putting out manuals telling parents not to iron, surely), the obvious lack of meaningful impact, the waste of money (well, probably – but definitely a waste of paper), the breakdown of respect from the government to the family, from the family back to the government: all this, just to avoid saying "your situation has materially deteriorated because there's a recession and there aren't many jobs". I don't blame them, the truth is ugly. But maybe government departments should stick to VAT legislation – no chance of over-complication there.